10-06-05, 8:41 am

There is a real estate 'boom' in New Orleans and other devastated areas as desperate people sell shattered houses and the speculators move in buying up land to make money. Perhaps a future New Orleans will be gentrified with the aid of snorkels.

Actually, the offers to buy New Orleans real estate are coming in from all over the country and an ad has even been posted by a Chicago Real Estate agent to purchase flooded land. Land doesn’t depreciate, the agent, figures, and people need money, so why not play let’s make a deal in the private sector to which the Bush administration pays homage.

It goes on. People with money who lost their homes are busily bidding up the price of real estate in nearby Baton Rouge; some people whose for sale houses withstood the hurricane well have radically increased their asking price. Meanwhile, the Bush administration encourages all of this 'private initiative' and moves ahead with plans to 'offset' federal aid for the reconstruction of New Orleans with cuts in education, transportation, health services and other vital social programs.

Since a majority of the victims are African American, a chorus of racist right-wing 'politically correct' statements and speculation accompanies the administration’s support for speculators, FEMA’s attempts to use public funds from U.S. taxpayers to re-imburse religious groups involved in providing aid and relocating victims, and the arguments about what to cut and how to keep tax cuts.

If housing is a commodity to be bought and sold in a 'free market' than all of this anti-humanism makes a certain sense. Natural disasters are also commercial opportunities for those situated to take advantage of them. After all, isn’t it good Social Darwinist doctrine that those with wealth have proved their superiority in the great game of 'natural selection' and those without wealth deserve to be uprooted, displaced, perhaps even made extinct, for the greater social good? There will be a better New New Orleans to the 'politically correct' rightwing Republicans (and they are much more 'politically correct' because they have much more political power than the Center or the Left) when these people are gone for good from the poor neighborhoods from which they have fled. The new New Orleans will have higher property values, better rated bonds, and people smart enough to invest in cheap labor in poor countries and live off their investments as they compete with each to buy the best yachts, the finest wines, and the best of everything from a world market which caters to, at most, ten percent of humanity and neglects the remaining ninety percent. Maybe even the public funds to religious groups to aid victims can be reduced and the religious groups can be encouraged to counsel victims to accept their fate and work for their reward in an afterlife. That might be a good deficit reduction policy.

This insanity is our reality, not Jonathan Swift’s 18th century 'modest proposal' to end poverty through cannibalism, but the 21st century social cannibalism that the capitalist economic jungle produces.

A socialist society, and only a socialist society, can plan seriously for the welfare and well-being of the entire population, sans speculators and profiteers. A capitalist society, however, chastened by a strong labor movement and left can tax and regulate the capitalist class, and institute price controls (as capitalist states do in wartime) to prevent the 'scavengers real estate boom' that New Orleans is currently experiencing.

It is also both possible and necessary to establish modern flood control systems (expensive but a lot cheaper than what New Orleans faces) of the kind that have been instituted in the Netherlands and other countries

To do that, one has to bury rather than worship the twin ideologies of 'laissez-faire capitalism' and Social Darwinism which have always functioned as self-serving and self-aggrandizing rationales for exploitation and oppression

The battle for New Orleans is just beginning. It is a battle for both democracy and an America whose national identity and international reputation will be more than the glorification of getting rich quick by any means necessary, the personal credo of the Bush administration and its more knowledgeable supporters.

If we, meaning the broad left and those sections of the center who are willing to fight against rightwing Republican political hegemony, don’t win the fight, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will just be the beginning of the disaster for working people in both New Orleans and the U.S as a whole.

Barbara Bush’s early statement that those in Houston shelters had little to begin with and were pretty well off there (in Social Darwinist lingo, society is better off neglecting the 'unfit' since they merely take away from the 'fit' who have) will be read by people of the future the way Herbert Spencer’s (the great philosopher of Social Darwinism) comments in the mid 19th century that Britain was better off letting miners die rather than institute safety regulations in the mines because the cost of such regulations would reduce investment in and production of coal was read with horror by early 20th century people.

William Bennett’s recent statement that abortion (which he claims to be against on 'moral' grounds rather than for on 'economic' grounds) should be used against African Americans to reduce the crime rate(notice he didn’t mention degenerate gamblers of all races, colors, and creeds) will be read by people of the future the way Hitler’s rantings against 'useless eaters' (the 'unfit' who take land and resources, 'living space,' away from the German 'Master Race') was read by anti-fascists with horror when they were made and by most of humanity after World War II. What sorts of leaders did these things, people of the future will ask, and what sort of people in the opposition let them get away with it?

I am of course assuming that people of the future will be living on the up side of Frederick Engel’s famous comment at the end of his life: that the choice society faced was between socialism and barbarism. If the forces of barbarism prevail, and they have been on a roll for the last generation, particularly after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, unregulated environmental destruction and militarism will ensure that we won’t have too much of a future to worry about.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.